There has been a considerable rise in need for interoperability of data in the healthcare system. This is either to reduce costs or increase care quality. In hospital or health information exchange (HIE) and global healthcare networks or for healthcare research where statistics and cohorts are to be derived from large populations matching certain criteria, data from different collections may be combined or exchanged. To be useful, the data must be interoperable. The criteria are defined in a semantically similar manner or somehow translated from different sources into a standard semantic representation such that searches can be performed seamlessly.
Semantic interoperability allows computer systems to transmit data with unambiguous, shared meaning. Semantic interoperability enables machine computable logic, inferencing, knowledge discovery, and/or data federation between information systems. Semantic interoperability provides for the packaging of data (syntax) and the simultaneous transmission of the meaning with the data (semantics). The information and the meaning of the information may be shared.
As part of the healthcare reform, the meaningful use guidelines regulate interoperability of data. The first phase requirement is just for lab data, but will extend to other data (clinical, demographic, and/or financial) in the future. However, many information systems or data sets at different healthcare entities are not semantically interoperable. To exchange information, a manual mapping or translation is used. For large amounts of data available in the medical field, manual mapping or translation is costly, time consuming, and error prone.